Building Calndr, a free AddEvent alternative

Coronavirus has impacted pretty much every business large and small, and has resulted in a massive surge in online events. Companies that previous provided solely physical services are switching to webinars and online courses, so the demand for tech in this area has spiked.

In the last few months, I've had multiple different clients come to me with requests to help them schedule events online. There's some existing services that allow you to create add to calendar links out there, such as AddEvent, but they are expensive for what they do - essentially just generating a few links in a certain format (for different calendar software).

After integrating a simple version into one of my client's applications, I decided to create Calndr.link. It's a super simple service that allows you to generate calendar links for all the major providers in a couple of clicks. Enter the event details (title, location/meeting link, date, etc) and hit generate and you'll be provided with some HTML to copy/paste directly into your newsletter, website, email signature, etc. You can also copy/paste the direct links as well, if you prefer.

The Tech

I decided to have some fun when building this, using Interia.js (totally overkill for moment, but fun!). On the back end, it's running Laravel 7.

It's deployed on Google Cloud using Cloud Run, so it's running completely serverless. I love the flexibility and ease of use, just whip up a simple docker container, push it to the image registry and hit deploy!

Since you're only charged for requests that actually hit the server, it's extremely cheap. It's basically Lambda, but you can run anything (since it runs custom docker containers).

I'm planning on writing a guide on how to deploy Laravel on GCR serverless, so keep an eye out for that!

Feel free to leave a comment if you've got any questions or suggestions for Calndr.link!